Census 'faked' unemployment to aid Obama re-election

With polls now showing Americans' widespread belief that President Obama's "Affordable Care Act" was passed through fraud, the New York Post reports that just before the November 2012 presidential election, the U.S. Census Bureau "faked" the nation's unemployment rate to help Obama win.

A month before Election Day, the government's official unemployment rate surprisingly broke through the psychological 8 percent mark for the first time in nearly four years with a September "jobless rate" of 7.8 percent.

The welcome news was hailed by the Obama administration as proof the president's controversial spending and regulatory policies were healing the troubled economy.

At the time, high-profile skepticism was immediate. Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric, charged the data was fudged.

"Unbelievable jobs numbers … these Chicago guys will do anything … can't debate so change numbers," Welch tweeted.

Real-estate billionaire Donald Trump agreed with Welch: "He's 100 percent correct, in terms of his statement about jobs. And after the election they'll do a big correction."

Added Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone: "I give Jack a lot of credit for being there and standing out. It makes it easier for me, because he and I share the same point of view. These numbers don't square with what's going on with the economy."

The White House indignantly shot back at the skeptics, with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis protesting: "This is a methodology that's been used for decades. And it is insulting when you hear people just cavalierly say that somehow we're manipulating numbers."

Now, however, the New York Post reports the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report.

The Post said the deception, which continues today, went beyond the employee and escalated at the time Obama was seeking reelection.

Beyond helping Obama win a second term – an election which, were it held today according to a poll, he would lose – unemployment statistics play a major role in determining national policy.

The Post noted, for example, the Federal Reserve is basing the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing policy in part on the unemployment rate. Falsifying the rate, therefore, could have dire consequences for the country, the paper said.

The Census Bureau fakery isn't the only manipulation of employment numbers, however.

As WND reported after the November election, the only way the government could arrive at an unemployment rate as low as 8 percent is by intentionally leaving large numbers of unemployed people out of the calculations.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in September 2012, 2.5 million people were marginally attached to the labor force.

Even though these individuals wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, they were not counted because they didn't look for work in the four weeks prior to the survey.

Furthermore, the government's "official" unemployment stats also don't include part-time workers who want and need full-time work.

As the PolicyMic.com blog summarized, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 7.8 percent figure "does not include unemployed members of the workforce who are not actively looking for work; nor does it factor in workers with part-time jobs who are seeking full-time employment. When these workers are included, the (U-6) un/underemployment rate for September remained at 14.7 percent as it had been in August."

In an article titled "The Real Unemployment Rate," Fox Business News analyst Elizabeth MacDonald did the math and arrived at virtually the same number: 14.5 percent unemployment.

And Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report's editor in chief, wrote: "Given that the median period of unemployment is now in the range of five months, vast numbers who want to work are just not counted. If we include, as we should, people who have applied for a job in the last 12 months, and those employed part time who want full-time work, the real unemployment number is closer to 15 percent."